The institutional form and conception of Higher Education have changed through the growth of mass higher education, which in many national systems now operates on market logics. Drawing on theories of credentialism, this article provides a critical analysis of the inter-relationship between massification and marketization and examines a range of…

"Stackable" credentials offer opportunities for college students to start by earning short-term credentials in vocational and technical fields, then stack additional credentials as they progress in careers, building skills in the classroom and in the workforce. Stackable credentials come at a cost: colleges expend resources in developing…

Purpose: The value of transverse skills, including human capabilities, has been acknowledged for a significant period of time by major organisations such as UNESCO and the World Economic Forum. This paper reports on the application of microcredentials linked to the Human Capability Framework in a major telecommunications organisation that has a…

Career and technical education (CTE) incorporates occupational skills, workforce readiness skills, and credentials that make high school graduates better prepared for the workforce. Students who complete CTE programs of study have higher employment rates after high school graduation and often go on to postsecondary education. For those who do not…

Research suggests teachers' observable characteristics are inequitably distributed across schools, leaving minoritized students with less exposure to experienced and credentialed teachers. While prior research focuses on how the teacher sorting explains disparities in students' test scores, little research explores how teacher quality gaps might…

In this study, we investigated the factors associated with education-job mismatches among US workers by immigrant generation. We used the data from the U.S. sample of the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and documented the distribution of education-job mismatches across selected independent variables. We…

Student performance evaluations are a traditional method for assessing a student's skills during a work-integrated learning (WIL) experience. While these assessments provide students with feedback on the development of their skills, little documentation of student performance exists after the WIL experience. This paper explores the role of…

Nationally, the labor market is seeking workers to fill the increasing number of high salary job vacancies, but those qualified to fill them are in limited supply. The skills and third-party industry credentials earned in secondary Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs seem a perfect fit for the student, employer, and economy. However,…

This paper argues that micro-credentials are gig credentials for the gig economy. Micro-credentials are short competency-based industry-aligned units of learning, while the gig economy comprises contingent work by individual 'suppliers'. Both can be facilitated by (often the same) digital platforms, and both are underpinned by social relations of…

New America analyzed the national landscape of educator micro-credentials (MCs) to determine how to best harness their potential to more successfully attract, develop, and retain great teachers. We find MCs to be a promising alternative to more traditional (and largely ineffective), compliance-focused teacher professional development, as well as…

This brief draws upon its companion report, "Harnessing Micro-credentials for Teacher Growth: A National Review of Early Best Practices," as well as New America's previous work on educator micro-credentials, to outline a set of model policy proposals for states to effectively incorporate high-quality micro-credentials into educator…

This paper critiques the emergence of micro-credentials in higher education. It argues that micro-credentials build on the discourse of employability skills and 21st century skills within human capital theory, and that they increase the potential of human capital theory to 'discipline' the HE curriculum to align it more closely with putative…

Diploma and degree completion have become the fundamental standard for judging the performance of secondary and postsecondary educational institutions. Increasingly, leaders of education and workforce policy and programs assume that these measures of attainment effectively serve as indicators of adequate levels of essential literacy and numeracy…

Exploiting information on foreign qualifications for the first time, we estimate the returns to obtaining UK higher degrees for foreign graduates who migrated to the UK in their 20s. Accounting for direct measures of foreign and UK qualifications and country-of-origin fixed effects, we find substantial returns to obtaining UK (higher) degrees on…

Community college campus internationalization is only represented in a small portion of the institutions in the U.S. Global Studies Certificates (GSC) are in an even smaller proportion of community colleges, but offers a credentialed program for curricular and co-curricular activities to be used to work with campus internationalization. This pilot…